Equal and Opposite Reaction
by Crave Kashmir
Summary: Leave it to science to challenge everything Sarah thought she knew about her time spent Underground. A one shot, short story. Complete. Sarah & implied Jareth


Equal and Opposite Reaction  
A Short Labyrinth Story

* * *

There was plenty of motion. It was lunch time and students from the university were congregating around the mecca of intellectual development known as the café. The downtown was small, barely four square blocks and filled with businesses designed solely to lure the students from their campus. Cafés abound as did late-night diners and vegan restaurants. Contrived as it was, it still worked. Students flocked across the street and into downtown at all hours. Lunchtime was no more or less busy than midnight; cafés and diners were open and ready to serve.

Sarah Williams sat at one such café, shaded by the bright green awning advertising a beer they carried exclusively. She ignored their promotions and stuck with a cup of tea and a sandwich. Her feet were up on the chair opposite and she had a notebook open in front of her. This was not unusual for the brunette, who often occupied a table at the cafés for hours on end. She kept the waiter busy bringing her cups of tea, so they could not complain too much about her lingering presence. She liked to people watch. The passing college students gave plenty to look at and also plenty of ideas.

She was majoring in creative writing, with a second major in psychology. Every hour she spent at a café downtown left her with at least a page of notes. She noted physical features, voices, music and clothing. It was all fodder for her overactive imagination.

The Labyrinth may have forced her to grow up, but it didn't put a stop to her dreaming. She reveled in her imaginary characters. Only now, just four years later, she didn't live the fairy tales, she wrote them.

Today, however, the young woman was not staring at those around her for her own enjoyment. She had an assignment. The university required her to take a science outside of her chosen psychology; she still had bad memories of being forced to dissect animals in high school biology, and so opted for Physics for Non-Majors, assuming the course might help add realism to any accident or fight scene that might appear in her written works. Blessedly, the professor kept the material light, knowing full well he would not convert a single one of them to the Department of Physics.

She looked back at the assignment the class had been given as their mid-term paper: Relate Sir Isaac Newton's Three Laws of Motion to your chosen major. It would be easy enough to write a paper about using physics in her creative works – a sword swinging will be stopped by a shield or something like that. The trouble was that Sarah liked a challenge. So rather than type up a quick five- to ten-page paper about the Three Laws and her fiction, she chose the hard route. She was going to relate physics to psychology.

It will be a piece of cake, she thought to herself.

"So… First Law… an object in motion…" she muttered to herself as she considered the students walking past her on the sidewalk. Her plan to challenge herself suddenly did not seem like such a good one. How could she relate an object to human behavior? To human experience? To human emotion?

"Let's look at this logically," she said, "how could an outside force stop a person's thoughts or feelings or behaviors?" She doodled on the page as she considered it, imagining potential outside influences. She glanced down and saw she had drawn the most outside influence she could ever conceive – a man, tall, thin with wild blond hair and eyes dark with impossible promises, a cape billowing dramatically from his shoulders as he stood on a hillside overlooking a challenge. Yes, The Goblin King was certainly an outside force, possibly the ultimate outside force.

First Law of Motion: An object in motion will remain in motion unless an outside force acts upon it.

Sitting in the shade of a ghastly green awning, Sarah contemplated the past. She saw herself as she had been four years ago. An only child for all her life until the arrival of Toby, her now-beloved half-brother, she was self-centered at best. She had been fourteen when her father finally remarried, an unbearable prospect. Her mother had instilled in her a love of fairytales, which were all filled to the brim with the evils of step-parents. Looking at it now, she didn't understand how she could have spent so many hours reading those stories without once truly grasping the morals they had been invented to teach.

Karen, her father's new wife, had been nothing but kind to her, asking her to do only what would be expected of any teenager. Sarah gaped when Karen told her to wash the dishes; she threw a tantrum when she was told to clean her room; she practically ran away from home when Karen assigned her laundry duty. Sarah had been doing those things anyway, but she did them when she chose and at her leisure. Living with a bachelor had made her rather lazy, but she did her part when she wanted to or when lack of clean underwear forced her to. But to be given chores, essentially _ordered_ to clean, was all she needed to cast Karen in the role of the wicked step-mother.

Sarah disobeyed her step-mother at every opportunity. She would sweep dramatically from the room when Karen called the teenager on her misbehavior, then throw herself onto her bed to cry about her misfortunes. Things only got worse when Karen became pregnant. The woman could not be expected to take care of everything around the house and Sarah was drafted into service as her helper. Sarah saw it as being forced into servitude like Cinderella. She imagined a handsome prince rescuing her. Instead, she got a king, handsome in a wicked sort of way. He offered the girl her dreams in exchange for a life.

A chill ran through her at the thought of her own awful behavior towards a baby. He wasn't even a year old; helpless, he could only cry to communicate and she had hated him for it. The poor child probably had tremendous gas pains after his rushed seven o'clock feeding – rushed because she had been late and wasn't there to assure her father and Karen that Toby would be fed. She had been playing in the park again, imagining herself someone else, somewhere else, somewhere far away. That night, as the storm raged as great as her temper, she held Toby aloft and cried out to have him taken away. What would have happened if she had not had her wish granted?

She would not have run the Labyrinth, certainly. But would she have learned to love her brother? Would she have grown into the same person? The chill continued to course through her as she considered the change that one spoken sentence had made to her life, to her mindset, to her future.

Spoiled and selfish as she had been, Sarah could not see herself changing without the monumental events of the Labyrinth. She was beautiful and got enough attention from her peers at school – even with her eccentric interests – to convince her that she would have friends regardless of how she acted. In all likelihood, she would have found a boyfriend, and then lost him because of her unrealistic expectations and high demands. But, Sarah sighed, she knew she would not have learned from her mistakes with that; she would have blamed each boyfriend in turn for abandoning her, leaving her to fend for herself in her nightmare life.

The way she had carried on, Sarah couldn't even believe she would have made it to college. Surely, being told what to write about for admission essays and when to send it would have annoyed her to no end. She would have complained and cried and left it aside to do when she wanted, only to miss the deadline and be left home after high school graduation.

The Labyrinth had changed her more than she had realized. After her time there, she was not just more loving to her brother, but more responsible. She took the initiative in her chores and in her homework, even daring to take Advanced Placement classes to gain early college credits. Despite the level of homework, she pursued extracurricular activities to take up the time she had once spent waltzing around the park in long dresses. Though, admittedly, one of those extracurricular clubs was drama, which let her play more than one fairytale princess on stage in front of the whole school. The difference was, she put the dress and the script away at the end of rehearsals and went home to be a great big sister and a good student. She didn't continue living it anymore.

Sarah had been that object in motion. She would have remained in motion had the Goblin King not influenced her to stop and think.

Second Law of Motion: An object at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force acts upon it.

The breeze blew warm and welcome across downtown. It set the awning above her flapping merrily and sent some paper napkins flying across the street toward campus. Those, she thought, had been at rest. If the wind hadn't come, they would have stayed resting on the table. However, that had nothing to do with her assignment, which was to relate the second law of motion to her major – psychology or creative writing. Since she had set herself so firmly into thinking about the past, she tried finding an example of an object at rest in her time Underground.

Ludo could call the resting rocks into motion, but if she wrote about that it wouldn't even make a whole paragraph. Had Jareth, the Goblin King, been an object at rest? He appeared at her window after she called him, but Sarah suspected that he had been active in her life for some time before she said the words that night. She had not just happened upon the little red book that showed her the way to the Goblin Kingdom; it had been placed before her while she browsed at the sidewalk book sale. The woman at the register had not recognized it as one of her own, and guessed at a price just to make a sale. Sarah knew that the Goblin King had been watching her and gave her the book, gave her her wish. No, Sarah thought, he was not an object at rest.

As she traveled from her parents' bedroom, dark and empty thanks to her wish, to the hill overlooking the Labyrinth and the castle beyond, she thought of all the creatures she had encountered. She knew so little about most of them, that it was hard to say which among them might be considered an object at rest. The fireys seemed constantly in motion when she was among them; the idea that they ever rested was laughable. The old wise man with his talking hat seemed more likely to fall under the outside force category. His words, though slow and rather cryptic, could stir any mind to thought. Didymus, like the fireys, was ever in battle, never resting.

That left one. The first of her Underground friends: Hoggle. When they met, she was overconfident, but lost. She had only just left Jareth on the hill and ran toward the gates of the Labyrinth. She found him killing pixies outside the huge stone walls, ignoring her completely unless she spoke directly to him and even then he was neither nice nor helpful. She finally got him to open the gates for her, with no small amount of patience on her part. He laughed at her, tried to make her turn around.

She hadn't known Hoggle was one of the Goblin King's agents at the time. She should have expected it. It was the Goblin Kingdom, after all, so everyone was the king's subject and, therefore, the king's agent. Hoggle was no different than anyone else. He just wanted to live his life, do his work and do what it was that made him happy, which was to collect pretty baubles. His life was far from pleasant, but in his jewels he found something resembling happiness. Sarah had taken that from him, taken his property, his collection, his happiness. She had held it above his reach and laughed when he couldn't even get close, yet still had the nerve to call him a friend.

She shook her head at how poorly she had behaved. Though, admittedly, Hoggle had just lied to her. He came to her rescue in the oubliette, led her through the corridors promising to lead her as far as he could in exchange for a plastic bracelet. Then, it all came out. Jareth appeared, strutting and boasting, and Hoggle told him that he was leading her away from her goal. The little liar said he had been lying to the king not to her, but she could not keep track of his stories. She stole his jewels and made him show her the way. He fled, even after enjoying the idea of having a friend.

When he came back to rescue her again, she thought it was because he was her friend, but he was still working for the king. He had been ordered to find her, to get close to her, to trick her again. He didn't lead her away from the castle this time, but gave her a drugged peach. He ran away again, shame showing on his weathered face. Sarah didn't know where he went or what he did with himself while she was in her drug-induced fantasy, but when he came to her again it was not on the king's behalf. He fought more bravely than he ever had in his life. He stood up to a monster, to an army and to the king. He defied Jareth for Sarah's sake.

She had come out of nowhere and completely changed his life. She was his outside influence. Hoggle would have remained stationary, going about his life, miserable and alone, but Sarah came and set him in motion. She set him forward to fight and to win some happiness for himself.

Third Law of Motion: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

No effort was required for Sarah to know which actions had reaction, and who it was that took those actions. She and Jareth each acted and reacted to one another in those hours she spent in the Underground. Whenever she dared defy him, he reacted. Whenever she succeeded in his realm, he reacted. Whenever she won a friend, he reacted. And whenever he did, she reacted; childishly and stubbornly, she reacted.

At the time, she had been terrified. She was facing impossible odds and an ever-diminishing time limit. Her opponent was more powerful than anything she could imagine, and his Labyrinth never gave her the chance to adapt; it acted of its own accord, and she had no idea when or how things would change. She was only 15 and saw things in black and white, fair or unfair, right or wrong. What the Goblin King was doing seemed extremely wrong and unfair. Taking brothers, changing time limits, tricking her; that was all wrong and not the sort of thing a fairytale king did.

Now 19 and safely Aboveground, Sarah had the dual luxuries of time and experience to help her see things more clearly. She recognized her own influence in the king's actions. He changed the rules when she dared to defy him. When she raised her chin and boldly proclaimed his enormous and elaborate maze to be easy, he reacted by making it more difficult for her. The Cleaners, a massive machine that scoured the tunnels of tree roots and debris with whirring blades attached to a protruding metal cone. It races down the tunnels powered by two relatively small goblins. Sarah and Hoggle had run as quickly as they could, but the Cleaners kept coming. If she had not acted with false bravado, Jareth would not have summoned the machine to challenge her.

She had reacted in horror when he shorted her available time. "That's not fair!" she had cried, and she believed it at the time. She was still a little miffed about it, even four years on, but she knew why he had acted as he did. She was cheating. She was supposed to solve the Labyrinth alone, but she had found a guide. With a guide, she could make it through the maze much quicker, so Jareth adjusted her time accordingly. She acted, he reacted.

Everything he did, as he said, had been for her. Every action he took, however unfair or terrifying it had been to her, had been in response to her words and actions. She caused her own troubles from the words "I wish." All he did was accommodate her until he orchestrated his own defeat.

There was no way that she could see it then, just as it's impossible to see the true size of a storm when you are in its eye. Realization came later. When she stepped away from her life and home and saw how different she was from what she had been. The person she was now, at 19, existed because of her time in the Labyrinth. The difficulties she faced made her realize what was important in life. The sacrifices she saw others make on her behalf showed her what as truly valuable.

What Jareth had done, he did because she asked him to. He had challenged her, chided her and, in the end, changed her for the better. His actions made her a better sister and daughter. His actions made her a better person. That might not have been his aim, but it was her reaction. Really, she thought, he might not be such a wicked king after all; he might actually be quite charming if she didn't act in such a stubborn and childish way.

Still, she sighed. She was just a college student. She had nothing to her name but student loan debts. She wanted to be on equal footing with her suitor; long forgotten were the dreams of being rescued and carried away by some handsome prince.

Thinking about what the Goblin King had done for her, she started scheming. Reaction for an action. She would act. She would graduate. She would write. She would make some of the most amazing fairytales anyone had read since Wilhelm and his brother gathered their odd collection of folk stories. She would make Jareth, the Goblin King a hero to dreamers everywhere, so long as they didn't know the right words to make him actually appear before them.

What would his reaction be when he found she had painted him so warmly?

An equal and opposite reaction, she hoped.


End file.
